Administrivia

To those who've been complaining that my comments feature is broken, sorry about that. I think it's some screwup at enetstation, which
I don't know how to fix. I'm going to be moving off blogspot to a site at University of North Carolina shortly, which should solve the problem.

posted by Eric at 2:23 PM

Great War II:

Donald, I buy your scenario in the West (Germans go home, keeping
Alsace-Lorraine) but I think Steve is right that your take on German
war aims in the East was too benign. What we'd have been looking at here
is a continuation of the Age of Imperialism, which in our history was
finished off by the exhaustion of the victors after WWI and WWII.

Steve writes:

The situation in 1915 Europe would have been 1942 all over again,
but with one important difference: The United States would never have
gotten involved, never mobilized, and never had the opportunity to get
used to the idea of acting like a Great Power.

Right enough. Let's carry this forward. As Donald has pointed
out, the drive on Paris revealed serious problems in Germany's C3 and
infrastructure. There would have been a pause of, I think, about six
to eight years while the Germans consolidated their gains and built up
their road and rail net. Their most serious internal problem in the
short term would have been sporadic anti-German revolts in the eastern
client states.

Meanwhile, after the defeat of the Allies, isolationist sentiment
in the U.S. would have become stronger in the U.S. than it was
in our history. The Wilsonian "War Party" and anyone associated with
them would be completely discredited. American ethnic Germans who in our
history were finished off as a coherent political force by WWII, would
have gained more clout. President Lindbergh, maybe?

With the U.S. neutralized, the big fault line in geopolitics would
have been the British Empire versus the German Reich. One important
thing that would probably *not* have changed would have been the
development of Italian Fascism -- but it wouldn't have taken root in
Germany without the post-Versailles disaster.

The Tsarist regime in Russia was on its last legs. But Germany,
as victory, would have been in a position to turn on its agent
Lenin and back the White Russians just enough to keep Kerensky's
govenment in power (but not enough for them to actually end the
simmering civil war).

About 1922 or so, the line-up might have looked like this: The
British Empire and a weakened, fractious Russia against a more
powerful Imperial Germany allied with Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the
Ottomans. But there's something wrong with this picture; it ignores
geopolitical rivalries within the Central Powers themselves. So,
remembering the British grand strategy of sea control and alliances of
convenience with land powers, I'm going to suggest that England's
course would be to snuggle up to the Ottomans and pry them loose from
the Axis. This would have made sense to the Ottomans, too; they
would want to constrain the rising power of Germany and Austria,
and I can imagine the British Foreign Office handing them back
southern Persia as a sweetener.

So the next confrontation would open with an Anglo-Russian-Turkish
alliance against a Germano-Austro-Italian one. France, even more seriously
mired in defeatism than in our history, would hardly be a player. The
U.S. would be neutral, possibly with a slight pro-German tilt.

Before general war broke out there would probably have been a
pattern of escalating friction on the imperial margins. Germany
would probably have flexed its muscles in Africa, first. Another
leading indicator would be the size of the German fleet. With no
Treaty of Washington in 1921, a serious naval arms race among
Germany, England and Japan would have been pretty much inevitable.

Imperial Japan would have been in a much stronger position than
historically, as well. With Russia weaker and the U.S. isolationist,
her main rival for influence in the Pacific would be the British. So
she would likely wind up on the Axis side, expanding onto the Asian
mainland even more agressively than in our timeline.

So the eequivalent of World War Two would have have been a bigger
and bloodier clash of empires.

UPDATE: Sombody commenting on VodkaPundit's blog said:

Take your scenario a little further. With France as the crippled defeated party, internal French politics mirror what historically happened in Germany. I think you get the rise of French fascists, who in turn blame French Jews for a "stab in the back" (Dreyfus redux). The Holocaust has a Gallic flavor. Instead of Teutonic efficiency, you get spontaneous mass killings by "citizen's commitees". Horrendous to ponder, but anti-semitism is not an exclusively German trait.

Very plausible. I can take this further: on their way to power the French Fascists have an ugly, low-level civil war with conservative royalists that
resembles the Spanish Civil War in our timeline, except in this one Germany backs the royalists. The Spanish Civil War itself happens more or less
on schedule, but plays out completely differently, too. Kerensky's Russians would have had neither the means nor the motivation to
intervene that Stalin did, but the Germans might very well have still backed Franco in restoring the Spanish monarchy against the anarchists.
So the likely outcome there was Franco taking power sooner, probably as a generalissimo under a weak Spanish king in Germany's orbit, glaring across the Pyrenees
at France.

Where this is leading is that in Great War II, the France that joins the allies is Fascist...

FURTHER UPDATE: With Bolshevism dead in Russia, the beau ideal of
the world's anti-monarchist left becomes not "scientific socialism"
but anarcho-syndicalism on the Spanish model. At the extreme end this
movement fuses with what's left of 19th-century romantic nihilism. As
a result, terrorism becomes an important tool of the fringe left
decades before the analogous development in our 1960s.

The British Labor Party turns increasingly syndicalist; in reaction,
British Tories increasingly link arms with French and other fascist
movements, which in this timeline are often genuinely reactionary
rather than being Marxism with a nationalist/racialist paint job.

In the U.S., trade unions also increasingly turn syndicalist and
anti-German. American conservatives tend to line up with the Bund and
the Kaiser; when Great War II breaks out in 1923. American industrialists
sell weapons to the German Empire. After a bitterly-fought election
in 1924 U.S. policy begins to tilt pro-British, but the change is
slow because many Americans are revolted by Fascist France.

posted by Eric at 11:06 AM

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

Naomi Wolf's essay The
Porn Myth strongly suggests that she lives on some other planet.
It has been pretty well fisked over at Haight
Speech and elsewhere. But so far, all of the people I've seen
shredding it are women.

Perhaps this is because it's politically incorrect for us panting,
grunting persons-of-testicle to trash-talk a feminist icon like
Ms. Wolf or say anything nice about porn. But here at Armed and
Dangerous, we are fearless — and, more to the point, we have
cleverly prepared our ground by having previously written an essay
entitled Why
does porn got to hurt so bad? in which we analyzed in detail why
most porn is so intensely ugly.

So I'm going to say a few words about Ms. Wolf's viewing-with-alarm,
speaking as a man. A man who is quite in touch with his own desires,
thank you, and has studied (yes, I mean studied) the effects
of porn on his libido with some care.

You show a young woman who makes herself sexually available but
has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and
I'll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.

Well, OK, I can imagine one exception. If the young woman in
question is hideously deformed, the can't-compete-with-porn insecurity
you describe might be justified. But in general, it's safe to predict
that an offer of pussy from any woman who is not aggressively ugly
will easily outbid the young man's hand for the attention of his
penis.

This is so not because young men are in any way enlightened, but
because they are fizzing with hormones and instincts that are designed
for the express purpose of inducing them to fuck...you
know...women. Lots of them. Young men are not noted for
being excessively discriminating in this regard. A biologist would
explain this as r-type strategy — since his energy investment in
reproduction is low, promiscuity is optimal.

Show me a young woman who thinks she can't compete with porn for a
man's attention and I'll show you one of two things. Either (a),
she's having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn't
notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a
lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she's not having sex with that
man.

There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in
Ms. Wolf's informants' reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn,
but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don't
deliver. Again, this has nothing to do with enlightenment, and
whether the dangling is a deliberate tease, a product of inhibition,
or simple ineptness at the courtship dance doesn't matter much either.
The most relevant causal fact is that young men get erections a lot,
and when they get erections, having an orgasm tends to move to
the top of the to-do-list and stay there.

Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who
thinks she can't compete with porn. First item on the checklist:
is she fucking him? If the answer is "no", then I regret to
inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he
likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn
babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for
flowing downhill.

On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going
to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this. I have a penis.
I've been fucking women for nearly thirty years, and not once was I
even remotely tempted to trade an actual roll in the hay for a fantasy
image and my hand. Not even as a confused adolescent, and not even
with the ones who were, relatively speaking, lousy in bed.

Any woman who thinks this is happening is evading a problem
with the relationship, not with his sexual response. By pointing
at porn, she is giving herself leave to ignore real issues. Like:
am I joyful in bed? This has nothing to do with facials
or Brazilian wax jobs — and, actually, as much to do with the
capacity to receive pleasure from that man's touch as the capacity
to give him pleasure.

Here's another secret about most men, most of the time: given a
choice between a buff "porn-worthy" chick with a drawerful of sex toys
who's grudging or unresponsive in bed, or a plain jane with
rudimentary technique who orgasms easily and generously, plain jane is
the one we're going to go back to. Again, this has a sound basis
in evolutionary bio; orgasm is a sperm-retention behavior that
increases the probability of conception, so an orgasming woman
is saying pre-verbally "I want your child!".

Having delivered a smackdown on Ms. Wolf's silly thesis, I will now
thump a number of her critics. Pretty much all of them report
this exchange:

"Why have sex right away?" a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes
was explaining. "Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable
when you just start seeing someone," he said. "I prefer to have sex
right away just to get it over with. You know it's going to happen
anyway, and it gets rid of the tension."

"Isn't the tension kind of fun?" I asked. "Doesn't that also get rid
of the mystery?"

"Mystery?" He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he
replied: "I don't know what you're talking about. Sex has no mystery."

Several of the fiskings I've read avoid Ms. Wolf's dim-bulbed
ascription of that response to the insidious effects of porn only by
writing off the kid as a callow, ignorant doofus. By doing so, they
miss his point as completely as she did.

In fact, the kid is right. There is no mystery to sex. The
mystery is in the stuff that is modulated onto sex like a signal onto
a carrier wave, Relationships. Love. Intimacy. Mysticism. What
this wise child is saying is that he wants to get the purely sexual
tension out of the way so that he can get to the mystery.

Shame on Ms. Wolf for being in such a swivet about porn that she
failed to notice this. But a greater shame on her fiskers, who had
no single axe to grind and time for reflection — and thus, not
even a bad excuse for their lack of perception.

posted by Eric at 2:24 AM

Monday, October 27, 2003

Stupid Like A Fox:

For the kind of articulate extrovert who tends to go into politics or the
media, it can be very difficult to believe that a stumble-tongued,
inarticulate man can be other than an idiot. As an articulate extrovert
myself, I've had to struggle with this. Like most of our media and
chattering classes, my instinct too was to write George W. Bush as an
idiot who had stumbled into the Presidency through no merit of his own.

Events have forced me to nearly the opposite conclusion. George W. Bush
is no idiot. In fact, he now appears to me to be an extremely cunning man
who makes repeated and effective use of his opponents' inability to take
him seriously.

Over and over again we've seen the pattern. Bush says he's gaing
to do something. Opponents rant and rave and scream about what an
idiot he is. Amidst all the name-calling, an effective opposition
fails to materialize. When the smoke clears, events unfold pretty
much according to the Bush script.

It's pretty much been that way on every issue bigger than judicial
nominations. Now, mind you, in this essay I'm not going to express
or even imply a judgment about whether or should be that way.
What I'm trying to point out is that even the U.N. has pretty much
ended up dancing Bush's tune. All of the Franco/German/Russian talk
of thwarting that mad cowboy has come to this in the end: U.S, troops
in control of Iraq, Saddam gone, and the U.N. formally committed by
resolution to support the U.S. reconstruction without either a timeline
or any U.N. authority over Iraq.

Once or twice could be luck. But Bush keeps doing this.
He is such an effective political operator that his opponents find
that their ability to block him has quietly vanished while they
weren't looking. The pathological rage now endemic in Democratic
circles is fueled by impotence. They know they were suckered,
swindled, had somehow, but they can't pin down why or how the
majority voters stopped listening. Bad enough to have Reagan pound
the crap out of them — they thought he was an idiot too, but at
least they could console themselves that he was a glib idiot.
Being shellacked by a Republican who sounds like a moron behind a
microphone is more than their blood pressure can take.

Well, Democrats, I've got news for you. Bush is using your rage to
make you into idiots. I think, early in his political
career, he somehow learned how to push this button reliably, and has
been sucker-punching his opponents ever since. Clever of him —
but then, as I belatedly realized when I was thinking this through. he
has to be brighter than he looks. The dude flew fighter
planes! Simpletons can't do that; the Air Force screens pilots for
intelligence because it has to.

Want to stop Bush? Then, Mr. J. Random Democrat, call Dubya evil if
you want — but accept that, on his record, he is pretty damn
bright. Stop screaming, take his brains seriously, and outsmart him.
That is, if you can.